I've been working on markwhen for a bit as a way to create timelines and calendars from plain text, like markdown.<p>I personally like tools that let you immediately start using them, and I set out to do that here with markwhen.<p>Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
Random feedback:<p>- On an iPad Pro (iPadOS 16.1.1 - not sure how current that is offhand), the UI is extremely unintuitive and/or broken. Tapping the example landed me in an editor that then took far too long to figure out how to get out of.<p>- It remembers that the editor is up. Once up, getting out and back to the homepage is next to impossible until you figure out the UI (clearing cookies probably would have worked, but that’s not exactly convenient). Reloading just takes you back to the editor.<p>- The timeline and one other view (can’t remember which one offhand) just showed a black screen.<p>- One of the biggest draws for markdown for me is the fact that it, in general, reads like a formatted text file. The formatting “instructions” are almost transparent in that sense. Not completely, but almost. My initial view of the example timeline’s source did not feel that way.<p>For example, sections:<p><pre><code> Section welcome #welcome
Blah blah blah
EndSection
Section foo #foo
Blah blah blah
EndSection
</code></pre>
(Ignore my extra caps; iOS is annoying like that.)<p>“Sections” in markdown would be written more naturally, and the end intuited based on the following content:<p><pre><code> # Welcome
Blah blah blah
# foo
Blah blah blah
</code></pre>
The extra wordy markup means little, and detracts from readability. Similar with groups. Date formats appear to get somewhat complicated as well. If that was resolved, I think it would be much better.<p>This is just a surface reaction to what I see; I didn’t do a horribly deep dive. I <i>love</i> the idea. It just needs some work if it’s going to be as smooth as markdown.<p>JMHO, and good luck in any event. =)
Whoa. This is hella cool. Love the documented spec (<a href="https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html</a>) and "here's an open spec I'm adding value to with a creature-comforts UI, but not walling you in per-se" approach to funding the thing. Rock on, I'll have to play more with this soon.<p>UPDATE: There's also a related CLI tool?! Oh HELLS yes. <a href="https://github.com/mark-when/mw">https://github.com/mark-when/mw</a>
The pricing structure I'm going for is offline == free, online/collaborate == paid.<p>There's a promo code on the most recent blog entry (<a href="https://blog.markwhen.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.markwhen.com</a>) for those who are interested
Hi Rob, I love the concept. I've played around with it for about 20 minutes now.
I use obsidian for almost all my notes and documentation because I like keeping everything as close to plaintext as possible.<p>I also currently use Omniplan for timelines and Gantt charts, so that is what I would be comparing Markwhen to, in terms of functionality. Omniplan is a very mature app and I recommend giving it a try if you haven't yet. There's a lot of ideas in there that you could import to Markwhen.<p>Thoughts:
- The travel itinerary planning aspect is interesting. I've never found an itinerary planner I liked, and many of them cost a substantial amount. I'd like to see more about this from markwhen.
- The syntax is somewhat confusing on first reading. I am used to using `###` to mark out headings and paragraphs and this conflicts with standard markdown in that sense. though I havent used Markwhen enough yet to climb over the learning curve.<p>Two biggest feature requests from me:<p>- release an Obsidian plugin for Markwhen so I can have Markwhen timelines inside my exisiting Obsidian notes. I'd be happy to pay a one off licence for this even though it would be locally run.<p>- Find a way to do automatic dependency levelling so that when one task is dependent on another, and I increase the time taken for the first task, then the dependent one is automatically moved forward appropriately.
This is not only excellent, but has a great working example that doesn't feel like a toy and showcases the app's features. Great work! Especially on the presentation of the app's value.
Really nice project! Thanks for sharing with us!<p>Having structured timekeeping capability in plain text (due dates/deadlines, work estimates, time tracking) is also a core feature of org-mode. Do you have a sense for how your approach compares?
Interesting project. Mermaid has an experimental syntax for timelines too. You might want to look at it for ideas.<p><a href="https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html</a>
I've been trying to find something like this, because I dislike most product roadmap tools and yet I need to use them often. Mermaid has an okay-ish gantt chart but it feels underpowered for what I need.
How does this handle dependencies / relationships?<p>Isn’t the real power of Timelines, is being able to adjust one task duration and then have it auto cascade down the impact to all the dependent tasks.
Really great work. I see great value in an ical translator, to and from if possible.<p>I'm working in Python land lately and a big fan of these plain text/markup like formats. I might've stumbled on this format before, definitely at least something similar and was excited. Can't promise I'll tackle the job but I do have great interest in looking closer at the format and seeing if I can load it into Python, and if I did then an ical import/export would probably be the first thing I hook up. Sorry if it's poor form to say I'll do it for dirt cheap if anyone wants to fund it, like $15/hour, might take under a week to get something working.<p>Thanks for the great work and demo that so powerfully illustrates it.
Suggestion:<p>Zoom/Magnify feature doesn't feel intuitive with the zoom being centred on the middle of the layout and expanding both to the left and the right. It acts like a vecgtor image editor, rather than like a timeline which tends to have an explicit start point. That behaviour makes it difficult to interact with.<p>My preference would be to have it start at an anchor somewhere near the left/early edge of the page, then while zooming, to only expand toward the right, pushing the future further away to the right.<p>Overall really well done!
I thought the application was broken at first. The timeline for the example document is scrolled all the way left to 1986 by default, with no visible scrollbars in Firefox on macOS.
On the landing page, there's a little blurb about a blogging platform (called "re:" I guess?) built on markwhen. But there's no link to any such platform and, well... trying to google "re blogging platform" is an exercise in futility. This is more of a gripe with whoever the heck "re:" is, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.
Not sure if this is currently possible but I would love if you were able to extract the dates from multiple docs at once. So I could for example have separate docs for different meetings and then put the relevant dates in each specific doc but then have a single view of all dates.<p>Looking forward to the desktop version.
MermaidJS is a markdown diagram tool with a huge variety of options including Gantt charts. Might be worth a look as well!<p>I’m on mobile otherwise I’d link to the Gantt directly<p>You can find it in the docs here I believe:<p><a href="https://mermaid.js.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mermaid.js.org/</a>
Great work. Nice blend of aesthetics and simplicity of building the timeline.<p>Along with embed link, I was wondering if there is a way to download the HTML of the rendered timeline directly. I use static pages for my blog and would love a way to add the rendered output directly.
Congratulations on the release. I've been following this project for a while and it's great to see this. I agree with many others here about an obsidian plugin but no rush. The work you've done here is amazing.
Does this support timestamps within a day?<p>When playing murder mystery games, frequently I need to construct a timeline of events. This would be the perfect tool if I can mark timestamps.<p>EDIT: yes it does! But looks like it needs to be in the ISO date format.
I like this, but I don't see an easy way to use it as a library. For example, I'd like to add it to showdown as a plugin, but the API seems too low level for that, at first glance.